What's to become of Longmont's former Kmart, Walmart?

LONGMONT -- A combined 17 acres of land. More than 185,000 square feet of vacant building space. One on the north end of town, one on the south.

So what is happening with Longmont's two largest empty retail buildings?

Empty Walmart:

Owners aren't talking

The former Walmart building, located in the Twin Peaks Square shopping center at 800 S. Hover St., was one of the first Walmarts in the state -- built in 1985 -- but the 94,200-square-foot store has sat vacant since 2011, when the company shut it down.

Stephen Elken -- president of Elkco Properties, which owns that entire center except the Walmart building -- spent a significant amount of money improving the facades on Hobby Lobby and the other buildings in the center in 2010. He said at the time that he hoped his company might get a chance to make an offer on the Walmart building if it were to close -- which it did the following year -- but he told the Times-Call recently that wasn't likely to happen.

"It's not a typical deal," Elken said. "The building sits on a land lease, and the land is owned by one person and the building is owned by another person."

The Walmart and its parking lot sit on 7.26 acres owned, according to Boulder County public records, by William Wade, a trustee of WLM Retail Trust out of Mount Prospect, Ill. Repeated attempts to reach the company -- a real estate investment trust -- or a representative of the company were unsuccessful.

"We met with a couple guys from the Chicago group earlier this year (in the first quarter), and they were asking just some general questions about what was allowed there, and we just walked them through the basics of the land use process," said Brad Power, Longmont's economic development director.

"We did indicate that we were going to try to develop some momentum around the redevelopment of the Twin Peaks Mall," he said.

The former Kmart building, at 2151 Main St., is seen in November. (Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)

The price tag on that redevelopment, scheduled to begin in 2013, is in the $50 million to $80 million range, according to the mall's owners, NewMark Merrill Mountain States. Given that the empty Walmart is just a stone's throw away, it's now a much more valuable property than it was five years ago.

The meeting with the Chicago people occurred right around the time NewMark Merrill was closing on the mall, and since then, the city's focus has been on planning for the mall's redevelopment, Power said.

The mall will be redeveloped using tax-increment financing, a common mechanism used in redevelopments of that magnitude. And there's a possibility that the same mechanism could be used on properties near the mall because the city's planned urban renewal area bounded by Nelson Road on the north, Sunset Street on the east, Ken Pratt Boulevard on the south and Hover on the west.

"We could still do tax-increment financing (on Twin Peaks Square) if we have the required characteristics," Power said. "We'll cross that bridge when the mall is done and there's demand for those improvements."

Whether the owners of the empty Walmart building are thinking the same thing or not is unknown, because they aren't talking, at least publicly.

Empty Kmart:

'A lot of options'

James Goldsmith, president and CEO of Miami-based Gator Investments, is more than happy to talk about the empty Kmart building his company owns at 2151 Main St. The 91,000-square-foot building on 11 acres has been vacant since the retailer closed it in 2010.

Gator owns about 20 Kmart properties -- some still open, some former Kmarts -- around the country, Goldsmith said, although this is the only one in Colorado.

"Someone will come along," Goldsmith told the Times-Call recently. "There's a lot of options. Sometimes these things can take a year; sometimes they can take three to five years."

He said it's possible that more than one tenant will be used to fill the large space.

"We're open to that possibility," Goldsmith said. "That's generally what we do with the Kmarts we get back. They work out pretty well broken up."

In one case, he said, his company filled an empty Kmart with an auto parts store, a Big Lots and a grocery store. In another case, it sold an empty Kmart to a city, which bought it for parking because it was next to city hall and the town's rec center. In another case, a former Kmart was sold to somebody who wanted to turn it into apartments.

Whatever happens with the Longmont building will be market-driven, Goldsmith said.

"The good thing about the mall being marketed (nationally) is everybody's going to see Longmont and they're going to investigate our site," he said.

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